The last lesson of the school year is often a tricky one to manage. Often, neither you or the students are in a particularly useful frame of mind – the energy and creativity is dwindling and it can be difficult to persuade students of the value of learning things for the sake of learning things: “But, teacher, we did the test already.”

This year I have made an End of year Review booklet for my young learner groups. The idea is for the students to look back at what they have done and to think about what they did well, what they could have done better and to identify a few goals for moving forwards. I have printed it as an A5 booklet and the hope is that they can take this home with them to share with their parents as a reflection on the progress they have made and the progress they could have made – along with some concrete goals for things to do in the summer months away from the pressures of the classroom!

The Grammar Graph is not really intended to measure knowledge or attainment in the language feature, what it really does is measure the confidence the learner has in their ability to use the target item. The features listed are all those that have come up in the past year and I hope that it will reflect the extent the learners feel they can use the feature appropriately and accurately. There may be students that have better control, but less confidence or there may be students that are very confident and fluent speakers but who have less control. These conversations will hopefully help learners to see where some of their strengths really lie.

The Word Championships are partly a vocabulary review and partly there as a mingle activity to get students up, moving around and talking to each other. The learners choose two or three words from the year that are their favourites – or possibly from their own knowledge. They then mingle and find out what the other students think and record the answers. After about five minutes (they don’t need to ask everyone for everything), the students work in small groups to share and compare the answers they got and to work out which words are the top three favourite words for the year.

The difficult and easy mountain is a simple enough reflection on course content – with any luck it should tie in to the grammar graph activity at the beginning – but with a bit more focus on where the focus needs to come in the future. I opened this up as a kind of pyramid discussion to the class to try and decide what the most difficult thing and what the easiest thing we did in class this year was. This not only gives some interesting feedback on the content the learners find difficult, but on which of my teaching techniques have proved more accessible.

The lesson Pie Chart is intended as a reflection on behaviour in the classroom. It is really up to the learners to decide what constitutes “being good” and extending this discussion out to the classroom can lead to some interesting revelations. The intent is also not to demonise L1 (in this case Portuguese) use, but more to point out how much class time they spend using Portuguese as opposed to English. If I was to do this differently next time (and I will!) I would separate these out into three or four smaller pie charts as while this gives an interesting insight into what happens in a lesson, it isn’t quite so useful for differentiating behaviours, which was partly the aim.

Most of my learners are in the 10-13 year old elementary range, and therefore encouraging them to do self-study work over the summer is an uphill task. The purpose of this activity is to get the learners to arrive at ways in which they can keep their English up over the summer and not forget it all, and still have a degree of fun! I am less interested here in getting them to do grammar practice or vocabulary learning, than I am in getting them to interact with the language in some way. One of the goals might be to read a book in English (we have graded readers in the school for them to borrow) or to learn a favourite song in English – to watch a TV show or film in English and write a synopsis or review. It will be up to them to decide.

The Superlatives Yearbook is a bit of fun really – it serves partly to review some of the language from the course – but it is really a bit of a break from the personal development review and a chance to engage in a heated discussion. You may have come across similar “end of year award” lessons – this is a slightly shorter version. In this version, the students are put into three large groups and have to decide who should be given each award. No-one in the class can be given more than one award and everybody in the class has to be given an award. An extension of this is to re-group the students into groups of three, one student from each of the larger groups, and to ask them to present their choices and agree on a final decision. The learners can then report back to their original groups on what was decided.

The last page in the booklet is a list of useful links that the students can access over the summer:

These are what I came up with, but I would welcome any extension of this so please feel free to add any ideas in the comments!

I hope this proves useful, if you try any of this and want to give any feedback, I’d welcome it – or if you’ve tried similar ideas in different areas, I’d also like to find out what you did and how it went.

This is a question that occurred to me in a frenzy of test marking that took place last month… I’m interested to know what people think!

I’d appreciate your answer before you read on….

Having gone through fifty odd tests and looked at the scores, there were quite a few surprises in there. Students who are attentive and hard working in the classroom who scored very poorly and of course the opposite – students who do the bare minimum and who mess around and who lack focus and who confound expectations by doing well.

So what does that tell us?

Mostly it tells me that labelling students as “good” or “bad” is not a particularly helpful activity and in fact I know this already and have written about it before in “The Myth of the Good Student“.

It also tells me that behaviour does not equal learning and just because something looks like learning, doesn’t mean it is learning. I remember a student who, at a previous parent teacher conference had been exhorted to try harder, started sitting up and writing stuff down more during lessons and doing the coursebook exercises promptly and with reasonable efficiency. Upon slightly closer monitoring however, it turned out that he was literally just moving his pencil over the page in random squiggly lines and then putting it down and saying “finished” when there were enough other students doing the same to hide in amongst. I’m not sure what he thought it would achieve, but it is probably a tactic that works in other contexts, where there are thirty odd students in the class and the teacher doesn’t get beyond the first row very often.

There is a part of me though that believes effort, when it is made, should be rewarded. When I see the “good students” who proactively write things down and try to do the activities and exercises properly and who try to practice the language, and who give every appearance of being bright, keen and engaged – when I see them fail or score poorly it gets to me. I want them to feel like the time and hard work they put in was FOR something.

The flip side of that of course, is that it ever so slightly annoys me when the students who don’t do any of the work and who muck about in the lessons just breeze through the tests without any apparent effort at all. There are of course any number of reasons why they might behave the way they do, one of which might well be that they know it all and don’t need to make the effort because it is familiar ground to them. Or they could be swans. Effortlessly gliding on the surface whilst underneath they are paddling furiously – they might go home to parents who sit with them for an hour a day doing homework or extra reading…. You just don’t know.

So my answer to the question is that it’s probably worse when the good students do badly, but there is a third option which I didn’t put into the poll: when bad students do badly. I think this is probably worst of all, just because if the intention and motivation isn’t there, it’s very difficult to get them back on track again. But let me know what you think…..

Earlier this year, a piece from the Edutopia website was doing the rounds under the title “5 highly effective teaching practices”. I automatically question pieces like this as I doubt somewhat whether the purpose of the piece is actually to raise standards in the profession and develop teachers – or whether it is simply to get a bit more traffic to the website. But perhaps I am being unnecessarily cynical?

To be fair, the practices the article suggests are generally quite effective:

State the goals of the lesson and model tasks, so that students know what they are going to do and how to do it.

Allow classroom discussion to encourage peer teaching

Provide a variety of feedback, both on an individual and a group basis. Allow students to feedback to the teacher.

Use formative assessments (tests the students can learn from) as well as summative assessments (tests that evaluate student ability, mostly for reporting purposes)

Develop student metacognitive strategies so that students can become more aware of their own learning and how to make it more effective. (Learner Training)

What surprises me though is that these practices are considered novel enough that they need to be put into a blog post? CELTA tutors may correct me (please do!) but aren’t these things considered essential on a CELTA? Aren’t we meant to be doing all these things anyway? I suppose it speaks to the audience of the Edutopia website, which is not primarily language teaching. Maybe language teachers are just more responsive and methodologically up-to-date than mainstream education…..

Image Credit: Pixabay

The piece is based on a book by John Hattie, who is the director of the Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne. He has made his name in the field of meta-analysis, effectively taking in all the data from studies that have looked at educational attainment and looking at it to see what patterns emerge. In 2008 he published “Visible Learning”, which was based on 800 meta-studies from around the world and which identified positive and negative processes in classroom learning, such as the long summer break that has now led some schools to adjust their school calendars to teach over the summer and provide more shorter terms punctuated by more, shorter holidays. In 2011 he published a follow up book “Visible Learning for teachers” that looks at the practical implications for teachers and suggests strategies they can employ to maximise the learning that takes place. The article is based on this latter book.

I don’t disagree with the suggestions made in the article – but it made me wonder what my five “effective teaching practices” would be. This is what I came up with. I can’t claim that I do all these things all the time, but I generally try to do them most of the time!

(1) Have fun. Obviously, it doesn’t necessarily follow that if the teacher is having fun the students are too (“Dance, my minions! Dance!”), but if you’re bored and pissed off then the students probably will be too. You can’t be happy all the time, and some activities and goals are more serious than others, but fun should always be there, like a background harmonic.

(2) Make it valuable. Time is precious to everybody, young and old, and we’ve all sat through too many meetings where at the end of it we walk out thinking “That was three hours of my life I won’t see again” that we should probably make sure our students don’t feel the same way about us! Again, difficult to achieve with ALL the students ALL the time, but possible to do with MOST of the students MOST of the time. And if you have a student who is getting nothing out of it at all, then they’re in the wrong class. I had a 15 year old CPE student whose main school teacher used to send him to the library to look up words in the dictionary because she felt it was a better use of his time than being in her class….

(3) Make them DO stuff. We’ve been having this discussion in the forums on another post, and again, it isn’t something that you can do for every language point or for every skills focus, but my everlasting bugbear with the majority of materials is that the students aren’t required to be active producers of language, but that they are mostly seen as passive receptacles. There is room for both aspects and indeed, both are needed to give the students time for input to become intake – but I don’t believe that is where it should stop. Involve tasks and activities that ask the learners to USE whatever language they have.

(4) Know your students. This ties in a bit to the first two because if you don’t know your students well, then you probably won’t have as much fun or make it as valuable as they need. But essentially as a teacher, your job is to help the students get from where they are, to where they want to go. If you don’t know them, you won’t know either of these things and won’t be able to help as effectively. I am a big fan of needs analysis, in particular using google forms for this process, and I do this with all my adult and exam classes. I haven’t yet come up with a decent needs analysis form for young learners, so if you have – please share!

(5) Teaching not testing. The majority of summative testing or formal assessment is completely pointless. The majority of tests don’t do what they are actually meant to do, which is measure what the students can do with the language. Very often in a language learning context what they measure is the learners ability to manipulate a grammatical structure under controlled and guided conditions, so I do wonder what getting seven out of ten in an exercise where the student has to put the verb into the past continuous tells us? Given the choice I wouldn’t bother with it. Including a test in a course makes a mockery of the idea of needs analysis and student centered learning, because as soon as you put a test in the course, it becomes about test centered learning. Alas I am not in a position to follow through on this idea completely, mostly because other stakeholders in the process want to be able to reduce an abstract concept like “language ability” to an easy to read number on a report card. But there we go.

So – these are my five! I’d be interested to know what other people think. It is a largely subjective process (despite all the research that John Hattie put into his ideas), so do feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

In many respects, the regular occurrence of systematic features is what makes a course a course. It is these features which tell us that we are moving from one section to another and thus that we have indeed “moved on”. Whether anything has been learnt is another matter, but from course design perspective, the impression of progress is important. There are pedagogical and administrative concerns as well – you select material to help you fulfill the course objectives and you then group that material into thematically linked modules – the systematic features tell us that we are at the beginning of a module, half way through the middle or approaching the end.

The advantages are then that the systematic features orientate us to our position within the module. When we encounter a particular feature we know (a) where we are and (b) what is expected of us (at least after the initial stages). The unfamiliar then becomes familiar and allows us to function and contribute effectively, thus adding to our own feelings of accomplishment and learning. The disadvantages are that these features can act as a bit of a straight-jacket – they might constrain learning by not allowing for experimentation beyond the task or they might constrain the teaching by not allowing the tutor to do something innovative. Plus, it might all get a bit boring.

This is just as true for face to face courses as it is for online – coursebooks in fact make a virtue of their systematic features (or try to). An example of this is Cutting Edge if you find your copy of the book and flick through it, you’ll find that the format of each module is broadly similar – some variation in layout and sequence perhaps, but the sections and design of the tasks is pretty much the same throughout. I think where F2F courses differ from the online is that the F2F teacher is freer to just throw their hands in the air and say “You know what? Today we’re going to….” – an online teacher, I don’t think, has that liberty. The units and materials are very often “up there” and the tutors and participants simply access them as they get to them, though obviously the tutors control the rate of access and when materials get released.

There is then, much more reliance on the course materials in the online world. The teacher is not so much of a resource as they are in face to face and the learners, who are often pushed for time and have busy lives elsewhere, tend to prefer only to do those tasks that they feel will be of benefit to them passing the course. Very often what happens (and here I speak from experience of both a teaching and learning perspective) is that participants log in, cut and paste their answers into the forum and log off again. There is reluctance – but not always – to engage in anything that doesn’t meet the course requirements and building the interaction between participants is therefore more difficult in the online world than in the offline world,

But you could also argue that the lack of rigidity and possibility of variance is a weakness in face to face teaching – the students are at the mercy of the teacher and have no choice but to participate in the lessons the teacher has provided. If the teacher doesn’t really feel up for it that day and decides to put on a movie / documentary / episode of The Simpsons and ask a bunch of content questions at the end to justify showing the thing, what else can the students do?

It seems that the course itself is a thing that needs to have a programmed rigidity, or perhaps certainty would be a better word. Whether it is online or offline, teachers need to know what they are going to teach and students need to know what they are going to learn. Within that though, there needs to be flexibility to deal with matters arising and the opportunity to dive off into something useful and interesting that isn’t on the original program. This is an area where I think online courses are lacking at the moment, but perhaps this too, as the medium develops, is beginning to change?

An Unsystematic Pattern? (Image Credit: Pixabay)

Note: I originally wrote parts of this post as part of my training to tutor online, when I did the IHCOLT in 2o13 and I had a reflective blog related to my training. I’m now rationalising that blog and am migrating some of the content here, rather than lose it all. Since I did the IHCOLT, I’ve been working as an online tutor with IH OTTI and I have updated this post to reflect this experience and my changing thinking.

It is easy enough to get stuck in your classroom, and stuck in particular ways of thinking about your teaching and your learners and even of course – yourself! Cambridge English have just launched what look like an interesting professional development programme – the #5teachingchallenges campaign.

In essence, you sign up, choose one of the options and then you get emailed short tasks to help you think about the area you chose. Each challenge takes about five weeks and at the end of it you get a Record of Achievement for each challenge. If you then want to do another challenge, you can.

I like that there’s a degree of personalisation in this and that you get to focus on the area that’s most important to you, as it makes a difference from imposed or pre-determined input and this can be quite liberating.

It’s been almost fifteen years since you started teaching. In fact I think at this point back in 2002 you were busy trying to complete the IH London CELTA pre-course task and trying to make sure you had enough cash for the course fee. If I remember rightly, the original plan was about five years?

Well, here we are now and it’s been a bit longer than that. I’m writing to you because, well, it’s mostly Joanna’s fault because she started it, but you can also blame Sandy as that’s where I saw the first of these posts; retrospective letters to our past selves – tips and advice across the years of experience.

I’m tempted to say “Don’t change a thing!” I like where I am now and what I’m doing now and all of the people that I’m with. I worry that my advice will act as a causality loop in the space-time continuum and that when I click “publish” on this post, that this iteration of me will disappear to be replaced by one where I am either ruler of the known Teflverse, or where I gave the whole thing up and went back to the office job I started teaching to escape. Of course that would create a paradox in which I never sent you the advice in the first place – so we’ll probably be alright…

When I think back now to the things you struggled with on that CELTA course and in those first few years of teaching, there are probably a few things I’d suggest.

1) Take your head out of the books more. You have a tendency to focus in on the material that’s in front of you, to look at the pages of the book and spend hours figuring out how to make it work. Remember the 50% rule (which I think Nick K. will tell you in about six months) and try not to spend more than 50% of lesson time in the planning and preparation. Also, just try to not teach the book so much? You can use the book as a syllabus if you want, a guide to what language to teach and in what order, but you don’t necessarily need to teach the book. After all, you are meant to be teaching the students.

2) It’s OK to not know and it’s OK to tell the class “we’ll come back to that later”. (As long as you do). Especially if you’re being observed (and yes I am thinking of one or two very specific situations you’ll come up against soon). Ignorance is not a crime, but refusing to acknowledge your ignorance is. If a student asks you about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for modality – confess you have no idea what they’re going on about! It will at least stop the tutor at the back of the room from holding his head in his hands and weeping…

3) Get out and about more. This will be difficult in some places because of your timetable, but you are going to spend a lot of time in some fantastic places and you will regret it later if you don’t take advantage of them.

4) Do more of the things you want to do. You will run around a lot thinking things like “I don’t have time for this” and “I can’t do that because I need that hour for something else.” This is foolishness. You still think like that now, but you’re slowly getting better at not doing it. If you mostly do the things you want to do, you will find that the things you have to do get done anyway – probably to the same standard as they would have done had you given them more time, but with less procrastination involved.

5) Start blogging. Now. I mean it. OK, I’ve just checked and WordPress won’t be released for another year and you are about to disappear behind the Great Firewall of China for two years, so you’re off the hook for now, but as soon as you get to Poland, you need to start blogging. You will discover a fantastic community of ELT teachers, thinkers and writers. You will find that writing about it helps clarify your own thinking on a number of teaching aspects. Basically, you’ll really enjoy it…

There’s probably more I could say, but these things are really the only things that feel important enough to write down. So it’s off down to the inter-dimensional post office for me, and if the world hasn’t melted by the time I get back, then we’ll know that either (a) time travel doesn’t really work, (b) time travel does work, but in so doing all you really do is add another layer to the multi-verse, (c) you didn’t listen to a word of it…..

Not so long ago I found out that two of my teenage students have been having a competition in my classes. Apparently they’ve been trying to see who can say the word “genitais” the most in class – this means “genitals” in English. They’ve been doing this for the last three months and it only came to light because they clearly got bored of my inability to notice and asked me if I knew what it meant.

Not, I’m sure you will agree, the behaviour of a good student.

But then what is?

The topic came up again with another class today, as part of a discussion on good study skills, so I asked them for their thoughts on what makes a good or bad student. Now this group is younger, they’re about 13 years old, which accounts for some of the content, and I reformulated one or two suggestions (though I was impressed when they came up with “the class clowns”).

In asking young learners what makes a good or bad student, you are always going to get a degree of polarisation and counter point. If the good student “always does their homework” then it stands to reason that the bad student “never does their homework”. Nonetheless three things immediately jump out at me:

The utter negativity of the bad student.

The impossibility of being a good student.

The complete lack of a middle ground.

(1) The utter negativity of the bad student.

Bad students here are demonized. Look at that word “rebel” in there! It’s so true as well – if you set yourself against the system in any way, you get crushed by the teacher or at the very least you are cast in the role of the villain for the rest of the school year. The problem is that, if as the teacher, you cast one of your students in that role, you aren’t giving them any other role to perform – what else are they expected to do? Don’t challenge authority kids – even when it’s wrong – because that way lies destruction!

There’s the social stigmatism there as well, “are idiots and are dumb” – if we can’t control our students ourselves, then let us, as teachers, set the children against each other and let them do the dirty work for us. We are civilized, we are emotionally in control and we don’t stoop to name calling. But we all know why the bad students are bad students – they just aren’t as intelligent as us. It’s got nothing to do with the background of the “bad” student, it doesn’t matter that they’re being bullied in the playground and are acting out because of it. Bad behaviour is not seen as a sign of emotional need – it is seen as a sign of poor intelligence.

And there’s the performance angle. Bad students get bad grades. Yes, that’s right, the fault is with the student. They are the one who failed to understand. They are the one who couldn’t answer the question. They are the one who had a bad day when it was test time and therefore they are at fault. The failure of a student to understand is not the fault of the student, it is a failure of instruction. I should point out that I fail at instruction all the time. I fail at even giving instructions all the time – I see the sideways glances and hear the whispered conversations and every now and again get the question “Teacher, what is to do?” Equally, I’m not suggesting that it is always the failure of the teacher – most of the time it is the failure of the situation surrounding the teacher – if you have a class of 30 students and you are busy dealing with three of them, you might not notice the quiet one struggling in the corner. Or you might not realise the student who has taken his trousers down in the classroom is doing all this attention seeking behaviour precisely to divert attention away from the fact that they don’t have a clue what is going on. But if we continue to decide whether students are good or bad based on their grades, how can we ever hope that our students place a value on things other than performance? When will our students ever see each other as human beings?

(2) The impossibility of being a good student.

Ok. The whole “wear glasses” thing was suggested by one of the students who just happens to wear glasses. And so do I, so I wasn’t going to disagree…..

But let’s look at what else is there: are quiet, pay attention, have good grades, are polite to the teacher, always do their homework, are intelligent (for a given value of intelligent, which I suspect would probably correlate strongly with “get good grades”). Once we’d got all this on the board I asked them how many of them thought they were good students. Actually I had asked them this before we started listing criteria and without exception, they started putting their hands up and saying “Teacher, I got 82% in history!”, “I have 90 in English.” It was this that started our little digression into what makes a good student as when I asked them if that was the only thing that meant they were good students, some of the other criteria started emerging.

When I asked them again though, about three of them put their hands up. The others said they didn’t always get good grades, or they weren’t always quiet, or they didn’t think they were very intelligent (how my heart goes out to them there!!!!), or they missed a couple of homework tasks. So that works out at about 25% of the class.

25%.

Only 25% of my class think they are good students.

How messed up is a system where 75% of the students think they are automatic failures? Where, by their own description, they are idiots?

Like most teachers, I would love to have a class full of polite, quiet, focused and attentive students who always did what I said and did the work. What I have in most cases is a group of students who can occasionally be persuaded to do some work, but who would really prefer to be playing games of some kind. I think the question from the teacher’s perspective is what do you expect? Should I expect my students to be “good” all of the time? It’s not like we get that all the time in the real world – just take a drive through the centre of your town at rush hour and see if I’m wrong! If we continue to set our expectations so high, if we expect our students, regardless of age, to behave as though they were us, then both we and they are doomed to failure and the class is doomed to a year of demotivated learning punctuated by tantrums.

The good student doesn’t exist. The good student is a mythical ideal generated largely for the benefit of teachers so that students, kids who crave praise and the external validation of the authority figure, know what exacting standards must be achieved and will strive to get that validation. The myth of the good student tells students that what their teachers really want – is to be left alone.

(3) The lack of a middle ground

The discourse surrounding student identity is completely polarised. Students, it seems, are either one thing or the other and see themselves in those terms. You are either for or against, good or bad, successful or a failure. There is a moral absolutism inherent in this view of classroom management that simply does not reflect the reality of the situation. It requires the observer (teacher or otherwise) to make a value judgement about the nature of an individual based on subjective interpretation of behaviour – according to standards that as I’ve already said, are unobtainable.

Most societies, even those that spring from more dogmatic perspectives, embrace a degree of relativism in their social and cultural attitudes. So why is there no middle ground in this?

What disturbed me most about the conversation with my class is that even at the age of 13, they have been brainwashed into this view that they are either good or they are bad. I know that more nuanced views develop with age, but the fact that students don’t see that they can contain elements of both is troubling. At any given moment, in any given classroom, an otherwise great student has let their mind float off somewhere. This is not a bad thing.

I tried to encapsulate this in a diagram – the idea is that at any moment in a lesson, students can place themselves somewhere within the diagram.

It’s not perfect and would probably be better as a series of bar charts. The positives are lumped together mostly because they tend to go together. If you’re in the right frame of mind to start with, then the rest comes easier. And so forth and vice versa. But it serves to visualise the series of dichotomies that students are up against.

Most students would probably put themselves somewhere in the top half of the circle. Some in the middle and maybe a few in the lower half. But very few would place themselves at the extremes and this is because by and large, we all occupy the middle ground. We are rarely completely one thing or the other and if we only see ourselves in these polarised terms, then we run the risk of perpetual failure or stressed out over-achievement. More to the point, as teachers, if we only ever expect brilliance and good behaviour from our students, we are dooming them to failure before they even start. If you can’t be brilliant, you might as well not even try. That’s the message it sends and we end up, inadvertently, teaching our students to be intolerant of anything less than perfection.

We are all individuals and we are all different (or at least most of us are). As adults we accept each others’ imperfections with relative good grace and we don’t define ourselves with arbitrary labels like good and bad because we accept that we all have strengths and weaknesses, different backgrounds and different interests. We come together in the middle ground to work together, study together, socialize and start relationships. Perhaps finding and occupying that middle ground is what we should also be doing in the classroom.

I think the last word in this should go to Joao, who asked me a question towards the end of the lesson:

“Teacher, am I the class clown?”

“What do you think?”

“I think maybe yes.”

“OK. Why do you think that?”

“Because I’m not quiet and I play a lot and make jokes.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Maybe yes.”

“Why?”

“Because then I can’t get good grades.”

“Well, if you can be the class clown and get good grades, then it’s not a problem.”

There are quite a few secret teachers out there in the world. People who have spotted things that need changing in their environment but whose ideas or suggestions are brushed aside or dismissed out of hand. This blog was contacted by a reader who needed some help to voice her concerns anonymously. I’m very happy to do that for this reader and indeed any other!

So the class is due to start at 9 and you are two teachers short. They are not picking up their respective mobiles and the minute hand is creeping round to ten past. The kids are in their classrooms, or milling around outside and your own class is due to have started ten minutes ago. People here often tend towards mild lateness, but such simple laxness is giving you kittens, week in week out. My emergency lessons are on standby, the trigger-finger hanging over the big green button of the photocopier so that you have something, anything, to start the classes off with before I run around trying to find people to cover the classes. Eventually one, then the other teacher, stroll into the school, say ‘dzien dobry’, and roll into their classes. Five minutes before the end of the class and those self-same teachers are the first out of the door, with a ‘bye’, only if you happen to be standing by the door as they rush homewards. Having looked through the windows of those teachers’ classrooms and registered dull, static book lessons and rows of bored faces of students you feel something should be done. But what?

As a DoS of a Central European language school with an inherited staffroom and with an indifferent local pool of teachers to hire from with a fairly complicated timetable to manage you find yourself in a bit of a pickle. You’ve talked to the usual suspects, they’ve promised to do better and for a lesson or two there was a bit of an uptick, slight improvements in attitude and delivery. But then there is regression towards the mean and you’ve come to face the fact that you’ve got some frankly lazy teachers in your staffroom. What to do?

In a bigger city, in a bigger school, there is more cover, the role feels more impersonal (I know, I’ve been there) and the action clearer. You would, ahem, phase out said teachers, at the end of terms or semesters, rolling in the new (hopefully better) blood as new classes appear. But in a smaller town, where the whole English speaking community know each other rather too well you know that unless handled perfectly such actions will blow up in your face. In such places it’s not good to be too harsh, or at least, gain a reputation for harshness.

The problem teachers moan about some of their classes; they’re ‘difficult’ or ‘sulky’ or whatever. But you’ve taught all the classes in question; these teachers seem to take a lot of sick days, and the classes seem fine when you covered them and you’ve concluded to yourself that the problem classes are problems because the teenagers in question in those classes are very, very bored. The very same teachers are the ones that don’t come to internal meetings and training sessions, that do the bare minimum, which would be called coasting if only they had a little more momentum.

You talk to the teachers in question again. Teaching is a vocation surely and not a well paid one. Teachers, you had thought, aren’t in it for the money. A laughable idea with salaries the way they are. So if people don’t like the job, why are they doing it? They make the right noises, and small improvements come, and then go again. You wander the halls, hear the students discussing the classes in their L1 (so naïve of them to assume you don’t understand) and discussing how poor they are, and you wonder about when and how turn the heft of the axe into a decisive stroke. You didn’t start this career to be a manager, nor to fire people, but sometimes it is the right thing to do…

What do you want from a mentor? As a mentor, what do you want from your mentees? These two expectations don’t always meet in the middle and it can be a cause of professional friction when that happens.

I recently wrote a post that tried to look at the relationship from both sides: From Mentee to Mentor and back again – a teacher’s tale. Thinking on this further, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint what I want out of this arrangement. I think it is important that every teacher have the opportunity to voice concerns to their DoS or manager, but equally, they shouldn’t be forced to… I suspect that what most teachers really want is to be left alone to get on with it as they think best.

From the DoS’s point of view though, it’s better to have the information before it becomes a problem, not afterwards. And leaving teachers to just get on with it can have mixed results…

Hence the existing system of mentor meetings, which I describe in detail in the earlier post.

When I was on the mentoring side, what I really wanted to know was (a) are you happy? (b) are your students happy? (c) what can we help with?. What I asked was more often bureaucratic in nature and dealt with the details, rather than the broader picture. Getting teachers to talk through each and every class is quite useful as it does bring to mind students and issues that might not otherwise get mentioned, but it somehow seems a more administrative function and not quite what the word mentoring implies.

Now that I’m a mentee again, I think what I’d like to be asked most is “Fancy a beer?” But in all seriousness, I think those three questions probably cover it!

So – a poll! I’ve put my suggestions in – feel free to vote for them or to add your own suggestions:

It was World Teachers’ Day last Sunday – and there is a certain irony in celebrating the teaching profession on the one day of the week that no-one’s in school, but never mind!

As part of the celebrations the Teaching English | British Council site asked their blogging team: “What does being a teacher mean to you?”

You can read all of our responses by clicking on the picture:

But it made me wonder. I know that I’m in a relatively privileged position; I work for a private language school, I get paid relatively well, I’m supported and offered development, and I’m plugged into a network of schools that allows me to connect with like-minded colleagues across the globe.

So my comment (in the post via the link) that if I’d won the lottery I’d still teach is probably a reflection of the working environment that I find myself in.